Re: possible deprecation and removal of some old QEMU Arm machine types (pxa2xx, omap, sa1110)

["Philippe Mathieu-Daudé" <philmd@linaro.org>]

On 12/2/24 13:32, Peter Maydell wrote:

> So I would like to explore whether we can deprecate-and-drop
> some or all of them. This would let us delete the code entirely
> rather than spending a long time trying to bring it up to scratch
> for a probably very small to nonexistent userbase. The aim of this
> email is to see if anybody is still using any of these and would be
> upset if they went away. Reports of "I tried to use this machine
> type and it's just broken" are also interesting as they would
> strongly suggest that the machine has no real users and can be
> removed.
> 
> The machines I have in mind are:
> 
> PXA2xx machines:

> connex               Gumstix Connex (PXA255)
> verdex               Gumstix Verdex Pro XL6P COMs (PXA270)

I can still run U-boot on these, but Gumstix webs are
slowly disappearing with the prebuilt images there were
sharing. Their wiki is also dead. I'm happy to use a stable
release for my pflash experiments.

> OMAP2 machines:
> 
> n800                 Nokia N800 tablet aka. RX-34 (OMAP2420)
> n810                 Nokia N810 tablet aka. RX-44 (OMAP2420)

For me these are broken since 2020 (commit 7998beb9c2 "arm/nseries:
use memdev for RAM"), this was discussed in
https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/f2f276a9-a6ad-a2f8-2fbc-f1aca5423f79@amsat.org/
but there was no clear consensus so I gave up testing them.